Where Islam spreads, freedom dies

In a speech marking the inauguration of the Strasbourg Grand Mosque, the biggest Islamic place of worship ever built on French soil, Interior Minister Manuel Valls pledged to come down hard on extremists, warning that foreign activists trying to stir up trouble would be immediately deported.

But he also held out an olive branch to the country's four million Muslims by promising state help for the construction of more mosques and for the training of Muslim clerics.

Valls, whose rhetoric has frequently drawn comparisons with that of rightwing former president Nicolas Sarkozy, praised French Muslims for their measured response to the recent publication of a satirical weekly's publication of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed.

"Islam has its place in France because the Islam of France, it is a part of France," he told representatives of the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant communities attending the official opening the mosque capable of hosting 1,500 people.

...Built within two kilometres (just over a mile) from Strasbourg's celebrated cathedral, the new mosque has a capacity of 1,300 square metres (14,000 square feet), making it 1.5 times as big as the previous largest one in France, at Evry in the Paris suburbs.

It has a 16-metre copper dome but no minaret and has taken nearly two decades to complete since the project was first launched in 1993. The cost of construction was 10.5 million euros ($13.5 million), with the local region and the governments of Kuwait, Morocco and Saudi Arabia all contributing.

It had to be big,to dominate strasburg,which being the other seat of the eussr sends a clear message.It seems that the wogs want a mosque each,as in England they can not fill the ones that they have already,yet still want more.

Hamas on Thursday announced a media boycott of Barcelona after the leader of the Spanish soccer league gave a complimentary ticket for an upcoming match to Gilad Shalit, the former Israeli soldier who was held captive by militants in the Gaza Strip.

I'm not having a go at you, I believe it was probably a Muslim (like the one in Denmark recently, except they used an axe). But I've been googling articles and I can't find any that mention his nationality. Perhaps because I'm only looking for English articles and they're censoring his race.